Robert Maddox has just opened his front door to let me in for the third time in three weeks. During each visit, Maddox talks about the house next door. It looks like the other houses in this rural middle Georgian town: two stories high, with a stone face and long rooftop arches, sitting on a few acres of wooded hills.

Maddox turns toward his dining room, walking by the oxygen tank he uses when he makes the 300-foot trek to the two-lane road where he picks up his mail, and shares the gossip he heard at the local market an hour earlier.

_________________With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none” Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."Albert Einstein

Good idea to get your water checked, and a good idea to replace all the coal fired power plants with GenIV fast (and safe, waste eating) reactors. I wonder if the Gen IVs can use the ash as fuel, seeing they can use even sea water radioactivity."My hair is 68 parts per million uranium," Welch says. "And then my husband started breaking out in disfiguring hives. His kidneys started acting really bizarre."

Welch says her doctor linked the family health problems to uranium poisoning. The uranium was traced to a water well on her property. That discovery led to more robust testing by University of Georgia researchers, who found more than 20 homes in the area with high concentrations of uranium.

Hair testing revealed that another Juliette resident, Jamie Worley, had high concentrations of uranium in his hair. Worley developed liver cancer and died, although it's unclear whether the uranium triggered the cancer.

Podcast: Power plant's neighbors complain of illness

The researchers say they haven't traced where the uranium comes from, although EPA officials said they believed the contamination to come from underneath a layer of granite 70 miles away near Atlanta.

Uranium is also heavily concentrated in coal ash. Plant Scherer produces hundreds of acres of coal ash per year. The waste is stored in a 900-acre pond surrounding the plant. Over the past 30 years, several studies have found coal ash more radioactive than the waste from nuclear power plants."Maybe it is the combination of both sources causing the problems.

_________________"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein